Strange

It doesn't decrease but does decrease? Huh? I can't find it now, but I read an article that explained in simple terms how the different components of the waveform fall of at different rates until you are left with a signal that decreases linearly with distance. You have already had explanations why gravitational waves are thought to travel at the speed of light. That is why the (hypothetical) graviton would have no mass. No, that is a simple 2D visualization of something happening in 4D. What it doesn't show you, for example, is that the gravitational waves causes opposite stretching and squishing effects in the x and y direction (and no effect in the z direction - the direction of travel). The waves are not completely symmetrical close to the black holes, but once you get a reasonable distance away, it becomes spherically symmetrical.

To check this, you would have to run simulations using the complex mathematics describing the situation. There is no simple equation that is going to give you the answer. But you can find lots of examples and animations of these simulations online. These are how the specifics off these gravitational waves were identified. Note that, in reality, the waves generated by black holes spiralling in is MUCH more complex than ripples in a pond. She is saying that if gravitons had mass it would make things more complex. There is, currently, no reason to think they do have mass.

That doesn't stop it being stupid. Are you being serious when you write this sort of stuff? I mean, really? You do know that Atlantis and Lemuria are myths and never existed? (It is possible that the Atlantis myth is based on the destruction of the Minoan civilization by the Santorini earthquake. But, although the Minoan civilization was quite advanced they didn't have magical technology and telepathic powers.) I think reading the thread title is more effort than the thread deserves. And the more you post, the less valuable the thread becomes.

Consider the analogy of dropping a stone in a pond (or two swans chasing each other in circles) these both generate sinusoidal ripples even though neither stones nor swans have polarity. So this isn't a "north-south" thing, just a result of a periodic motion. [OK, "just" is perhaps an exaggeration!]

DanMP, I recommend you read Janus's excellent (as always) detailed explanation in this other thread: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/92758-gravity-why-reinvent-it/page-2#entry906143

As the waves are barely detectable (changing the length of a 4km instrument by less than the width of a proton) I don't think there is anyway of extracting useful amounts of energy.

Can you show that dark matter being "space" matches observation? Why would it behave as it does?

"sounds like three words strung together at random"

What does that mean? We know the clocks all travel at different speeds. I'm afraid I don't know what that means. It is too vague. Does "all the observers agreed with the time intervals measured by the clocks" just mean that they all agreed that the clocks read different elapsed times? Well, obviously. It would be rather strange if they all looked at the same clock and thought it said different things. Or are you saying that they all though that the three clocks ran at the same speed? That is obviously not true. I think you need to be a bit clearer about what you are trying to say. I recommend mathematics for this purpose.

I am rather more curious what an "office chair scientist" is. It sounds like three words strung together at random. Is it like a banana satellite artist? Or a sundown bluebird dolphin?

No they don't.

You can't see, touch, smell, etc. space-time. So why do you class that as "real"? And if space-time is real, why isn't one component of it (i.e. time)? Space-time can't influence clocks because it would have to influence the clock differently for every possible observer, simultaneously. What space-time can do is change what we measure.

As the OP hasn't mentioned dark energy or accelerating expansion, this seems to be your own problem, not his. You probably should have started your own thread, rather than hijacking this one. Dark energy is part of GR (it can be represented by the "cosmological constant" which was initially introduced by Einstein). The rate of expansion is a scale factor derived from the Einstein Field Equations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann%E2%80%93Lema%C3%AEtre%E2%80%93Robertson%E2%80%93Walker_metric The fact that light takes 1 year to travel a light year comes from the definition of "light year", so I'm really not sure what your point is.

They are both analogies because they are not the Einstein Field Equations or an equation derived from them. In bot cases, they talk about things (cars, light) taking a longer path and therefore time appearing to slow. These are both just attempts to make the meaning of a one consequence of the mathematics slightly more intuitive to those who don't understand the maths.

The thing about relativity is that it does provide "a deeper insight in the nature of reality". Also, the mathematics of special relativity is very simple. There were initial attempts at a "mechanical" explanation, I think. The nearest thing to a successful theory that I am aware of is Lorentz Ether Theory. This is identical to Special Relativity but introduces an undetectable "ether" as the mechanical explanation. As this includes an undetectable element that makes no difference, and is therefore unnecessary, the theory loses out to Occam's Razor. As far as I know, it also can't be generalized to include gravity.

The fact that it is already happening? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS10_solar_power_plant

We already have a mathematical model of entanglement. Can you summarise the evidence that shows yours is better? What is the evidence supporting that claim?

It actually started with Maxwell (and therefore Faraday). His equations showed that the speed of light is invariant. Einstein took this as the starting point and worked out the consequences as the theory of special relativity. Many others were developing the same thing at the same time, most notably Lorentz and Poincare. The main tests are summarised here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity More modern tests here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_searches_for_Lorentz_violation Anf for GR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity (There are copious references at the end of those.) But that isn't really an explanation, it is just an ad-hoc interpretation of what we observed. Was there any theory that predicted that this behaviour of atoms? Is there any mechanism that would cause atoms to vibrate at higher or lower speed? And that would affect every other mechanism in exactly the same way? On the other hand, there is a theory that predicts and explains what happens...

Arguably, he used the word "religion" in a rather idiosyncratic way .... He was wrong about a lot of things as well. (His design for a fridge never really took off.)

I'm not sure about that. It could easily be a collection of random ideas thrown together by someone who doesn't know what they mean.

OK. But this is completely different from what (I thought) you were saying. Yes, two observers at the current time will observe the same thing (taking into account any differences in motion relative to the CMB). But that is not the same thing as an observer today and an observer sometime in the future. They will not observe the same thing. Someone in a billion years will see a universe that is a billion years older and cooler.

But it was intended to reproduce conditions that occur in nature, so it could have happened on its own. (Whether those particular conditions actually occurred or not is irrelevant, as both Ophiolite's and iNow's posts make clear.)

The detector doesn't look in a particular direction. It can pick up signals from anywhere.

I am afraid you ar wrong. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. It takes about 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. So any object must take longer than that, whether that is a spaceship or a giant arm.

About 1.3 billion. Actually, that makes it less implausible not more because it means the system is able to detect signals from a very large volume of space.